By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Sixteen months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the sense that Russia had slipped back into the era of "plebiscite" elections was uncanny. There was only one name on the ballot paper. Voters were invited to express confidence in the candidate: Yes or No, and no point in objecting that you might have more confidence in someone else. Voting was preceded by a short but intense campaign waged mainly through the radio and television stations — which did their utmost to avoid suggesting that anything but a vote of confidence was in order.
However, Russian President Boris Yeltsin's April 25 referendum differed from its precursors in one important respect: the results. Participation in Soviet plebiscite elections was always "over 99%". This time, more than 35% of eligible voters failed to turn out, often from feelings of alienation and disgust.
Moreover, the people who organised Soviet plebiscites invariably won them. On April 25, Yeltsin failed to secure the support of the 50% of eligible voters he needed to force early elections for the parliament. For the president now to achieve his declared goal of "neutralising" the parliament will require gross violations of the constitution — something which again will have Russians wondering whether they have really left Soviet times behind.
Even the president's much applauded victory on the first two referendum questions — on confidence in him personally, and in his social and economic policies — turns out to have been far less convincing than it might seem.
Electoral Commission chief Vasily Kazakov reported on April 27 that on the basis of preliminary results, Yeltsin won the support of 58.05 % of voters on the first question, and 52.9% on the second. As a proportion of eligible voters, these figures were 37.5 and 34.2%.
On April 21, Russia's Constitutional Court had ruled that the first two referendum questions had no juridical force, but only "moral" and "sociological" significance. These questions thus amounted to a prodigiously expensive opinion poll — and one which was obviously unscientific, since it reflected the views only of citizens prepared or able to turn up at the polling stations.
Scientific polling by the Institute of Comparative Sociological Research, reported by the newspaper Trud on April 29, showed that the people who did not intend to vote on April 25 were predominantly hostile to Yeltsin. This shows that the real views of most Russian citizens are those that have been recorded in opinion surveys over many months — a lack of confidence in the president and, to an even greater degree, in his policies.
Yeltsin thus remains a president rejected by his people. Moreover, the referendum has shown that his areas of relative popularity are quite limited in geographical terms. The president's "victory" was gained essentially as a result of heavy support for him in a few specific places: Moscow, St Petersburg and his home territory of the Urals.
Outside of these centres, a limited number of districts, often with small populations of highly paid workers in extractive industries, gave strong support to the president. But across a huge swathe of the country, extending with few interruptions from Russia's western borders almost to the Pacific, Yeltsin failed to gain a majority of participating voters on one or both of the first two questions.
A study based on early figures, and published on April 28 in the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, indicated that in at least 42 of Russia's 88 republics, provinces and autonomous national regions, voters refused to endorse Yeltsin's policies. In most of these 42 cases, participants in the referendum voted "no confidence" in the president as well.
Especially striking is the fact that of 13 provinces in the "Russian heartland", the densely populated industrial and agricultural districts of
south-central European Russia, only one province — Tula — voted in favour of Yeltsin's policies.
Yeltsin also polled badly among the 18% of the country's population who are not ethnically Russian. According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 10 of the Russian Federation's constituent republics voted "no confidence" in the president. In another republic, Tatarstan, the local authorities boycotted the referendum and only 23% of eligible voters took part. In a further two republics, Buryatia and Udmurtia, majorities were recorded in favour of the president, but against his policies.
In the months after Yeltsin began to demand a referendum, he was warned repeatedly that the move might well backfire, interacting with long-running feuds between Moscow and provincial leaders in ways that could blow the federation apart. He ignored the warnings — and now the referendum results seem likely to fuel a new round of confrontations.
Throughout vast areas of Russia, the political and managerial elites who control the local power structures now have proof that the local populations reject the president and his policies. The referendum results are both an invitation and an instruction to local leaders to demand greater independence. Yeltsin will be ill placed to deny the legitimacy of these claims.
In the southern Urals republic of Bashkortostan, an important centre of the chemical industry, more than 75% of voters supported an additional referendum question calling for the republic to have "economic independence, and relations with the Russian Federation on the basis of a federative agreement". Adoption of this will bring Bashkortostan into line with Tatarstan, the main centre of heavy vehicle manufacturing in the former USSR. Tatarstan now claims the status of an independent state within the Russian Federation.
Such initiatives are by no means limited to the non-Russian parts of the country. In Vologda Province, north of Moscow, local leaders placed the following additional question on the ballot: "Do you consider that the provinces and regions, including
Vologda Province, should have equal rights with the republics in the federation?"
The problems Yeltsin faces in shoring up his power and curbing regional separatism are reminiscent of those encountered in 1990 and 1991 by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. As Gorbachev's ability to dictate developments outside Moscow declined, he sought and won successive increases in his formal authority. These moves in turn helped stir local leaders — in Gorbachev's case, the leaders of the Soviet republics — to assertions of local autonomy that made the president's increased powers meaningless.
Analysis of the referendum results also shows that, in social terms, Yeltsin's support is distributed in ways that are not especially advantageous for him. Those who voted for him were not, by and large, the people capable of rapidly shutting down the country's economic life.
The president was supported by more than 70% of voters in Moscow and St Petersburg, the country's centres of administration and intellectual life. Unexpectedly, he also received majorities in most rural districts. Although Yeltsin's policies have gravely worsened the problems of Russian agriculture, creating a "scissors crisis" of industrial and agricultural prices, peasants have evidently retained the Soviet-era habit of turning out to vote for recognised leaders.
Who, then, were the people who voted against Yeltsin? The answer very often is: workers, especially in provincial industrial centres. Although the Russian working class must at present be described as politically passive, workers remain overwhelmingly unionised, and for the most part they are grouped in large factories. Their strategic potential is enormous, and the signs that emerged in the referendum of their alienation from Yeltsin's cause must be worrying for the president's camp.
Of all Russian workers, the most strategically powerful are arguably the coal miners. The referendum confirmed what journalistic reports have for some time indicated: the miners, who were instrumental in bringing Yeltsin to power through their huge strikes
against Gorbachev, have now turned against Yeltsin.
The Kuzbass district in Western Siberia, where 80% of Russia's coal is mined, recorded a vote against Yeltsin's policies. The voter turnout in such large mining towns as Mezhdurechensk and Leninsk-Kuznetsky was less than 50%, even though leaders of the Independent Union of Mineworkers — the main organisation linking underground miners — campaigned strenuously on Yeltsin's behalf. In mining towns of Rostov Province in European Russia, the turnout was also below half of those eligible.
Following the referendum, Russians can expect an intensification of the struggle between president and parliament, as regional and nationalist self-assertiveness increase and the cracks in the federation widen. But as the voting figures suggest, workers in Russia are gradually acquiring a sense of their collective interests. Yeltsin will not be able to put off forever the time when the opposition he faces will have a class character.